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Cecilia Fitzpatrick, devoted mother, successful Tupperware business owner and efficient P&C President, has found a letter from her husband.
‘To my wife Cecilia Fitzpatrick, to be opened only in the event of my death.’
But Cecilia’s husband isn’t dead, he’s on a business trip. And when she questions him about it on the phone, Cecilia senses something she hasn’t experienced before. John-Paul is lying.
What happens next changes Cecilia’s formerly blissful suburban existence forever, and the consequences will be life changing for the most unexpected people.
Praise for Liane Moriarty:
‘Superb in technique . . . All of her novels set themselves extremely difficult tasks’
SUNDAY AGE
‘a gifted writer, whose light touch doesn’t stop her exploring darker themes’
AUSTRALIAN WOMEN’S WEEKLY
‘What [Moriarty] writes are acute social comedies of the feminine, where the domestic is more political than cosy’
THE AGE
‘Moriarty’s prose turns from funny through poignant to frightening in an artful snap’
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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Contents
Cover
About the husband’s secret
Dedication
Epigraph
Pandora
Monday
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Tuesday
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Wednesday
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Thursday
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Good Friday
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Easter Saturday
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Easter Sunday
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About Liane Moriarty
Also by Liane Moriarty
Copyright page
For Adam, George and Anna.
And for Amelia.
To err is human; to forgive divine.
Alexander Pope
Poor, poor Pandora. Zeus sends her off to marry Epimetheus, a not especially bright man she’s never even met, along with a mysterious covered jar. Nobody tells Pandora a word about the jar. Nobody tells her not to open the jar. Naturally, she opens the jar. What else has she got to do? How was she to know that all those dreadful ills would go whooshing out to plague mankind forever more, and that the only thing left in the jar would be hope? Why wasn’t there a warning label?
And then, everyone’s like, Oh, Pandora. Where’s your willpower? You were told not to open that box, you snoopy girl, you typical woman with your insatiable curiosity, now look what you’ve gone and done. When for one thing it was a jar, not a box, and for another, how many times does she have to say it, nobody said a word about not opening it!
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monday
chapter one
It was all because of the Berlin Wall.
If it wasn’t for the Berlin Wall Cecilia would never have found the letter, and then she wouldn’t be sitting here, at the kitchen table, willing herself not to rip it open.
The envelope was grey with a fine layer of dust. The words on the front were written in a scratchy blue ballpoint pen, the handwriting as familiar as her own. She turned it over. It was sealed with a yellowing piece of sticky tape. When was it written? It felt old, like it was written years ago, but there was no way of knowing for sure.
She wasn’t going to open it. It was absolutely clear that she should not open it. She was the most decisive person she knew, and she’d already decided not to open the letter, so there was nothing more to think about.
Although, honestly, if she did open it, what would be the big deal? Any woman would open it like a shot. She listed all her friends and what their responses would be if she were to ring them up right now and ask what they thought.
Miriam Openheimer: Yup. Open it.
Erica Edgecliff: Are you kidding, open it right this second.
Laura Marks: Yes you should open it and then you should read it out aloud to me.
Sarah Sacks: There would be no point asking Sarah because she was incapable of making a decision. If Cecilia asked her whether she wanted tea or coffee, she would sit for a full minute, her forehead furrowed as she agonised over the pros and cons of each beverage before finally saying, ‘Coffee! No, wait, tea!’ A decision like this one would give her a brain seizure.
Mahalia Ramachandran: Absolutely not. It would be completely disrespectful to your husband. You must not open it.
Mahalia could be a little too sure of herself at times with those huge brown ethical eyes.
Cecilia left the letter sitting on the kitchen table and went to put the kettle on.
Damn that Berlin Wall, and that Cold War, and whoever it was who sat there back in nineteen-forty-whenever it was, mulling over the problem of what to do with those ungrateful Germans; the guy who suddenly clicked his fingers and said, ‘Got it, by jove! We’ll build a great big bloody wall and keep the buggers in!’
Presumably he hadn’t sounded like a British sergeant major.
Esther would know who first came up with the idea for the Berlin Wall. Esther would probably be able to give her his date of birth. It would have been a man of course. Only a man could come up with something so ruthless: so essentially stupid and yet brutally effective.
Was that sexist?
She filled the kettle, switched it on, and cleaned the droplets of water in the sink with a paper towel so that it shone.
One of the mums from school, who had three sons almost exactly the same ages as Cecilia’s three daughters, had said that some remark Cecilia had made was ‘a teeny weeny bit sexist’, just before they’d started the Fete Committee meeting last week. Cecilia couldn’t remember what she’d said, but she’d only been joking. Anyway, weren’t women allowed to be sexist for the next two thousand years or so, until they’d evened up the score?
Maybe she was sexist.
The kettle boiled. She swirled an Earl Grey teabag and watched the curls of black spread through the water like ink. There were worse things to be than sexist. For example, you could be the sort of person who pinched your fingers together while using the words ‘teeny weeny’.
She looked at her tea and sighed. A glass of wine would be nice right now, but she’d given up alcohol for Lent. Only six days to go. She had a bottle of expensive shiraz ready to open on Easter Sunday, when thirty-five adults and twenty-three children were coming to lunch, so she’d need it. Although, of course, she was an old hand at entertaining. She hosted Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Christmas. John-Paul had five younger brothers, all married with kids. So it was quite a crowd. Planning was the key. Meticulous planning.
She picked up her tea and took it over to the table. Why had she given up wine for Lent? Polly was more sensible. She’d given up strawberry jam. Cecilia had never seen Polly show more than a passing interest in strawberry jam, although now, of course, she was always catching her standing at the open fridge staring at it longingly. The power of denial.
‘Esther!’ she called out.
Esther was in the next room with her sisters watching The Biggest Loser while they shared a giant bag of salt and vinegar chips left over from the Australia Day barbecue months earlier. Cecilia did not know why her three slim daughters loved watching overweight people sweat and cry and starve. It didn’t appear to be teaching them healthier eating habits. She should go in and confiscate the bag of chips, except they’d all eaten salmon and steamed broccoli for dinner without complaint, and she didn’t have the strength for an argument.
She heard a voice from the television boom, ‘You get nothing for nothing!’
That wasn’t such a bad sentiment for her daughters to hear. No one knew it better than Cecilia! But still, she didn’t like the expressions of faint revulsion that flitted across their smooth young faces. She was always so vigilant about not making negative body image comments in front of her daughters, although the same could not be said for her friends. Just the other day, Miriam Openheimer had said, loud enough for all their impressionable daughters to hear, ‘God, would you look at my stomach!’ and squeezed her flesh between her fingertips as if it were something vile. Great, Miriam, as if our daughters don’t already get a million messages every day telling them to hate their bodies.
Actually, Miriam’s stomach was getting a little pudgy.
‘Esther!’ she called out again.
‘What is it?’ Esther called back in a patient, put-upon voice that Cecilia suspected was an unconscious imitation of her own.
‘Whose idea was it to build the Berlin Wall?’
‘Well, they’re pretty sure it was Nikita Khrushchev!’ Esther answered immediately, pronouncing the exotic-sounding name with great relish and her own peculiar interpretation of a Russian accent. ‘He was like, the Prime Minister of Russia, except he was the Premier. But it could have been –’
Her sisters responded instantly with their usual impeccable courtesy.
‘Shut up, Esther!’
‘Esther! I can’t hear the television!
‘Thank you darling!’ Cecilia sipped her tea and imagined herself going back through time and putting that Khrushchev in his place.
No, Mr Khrushchev, you may not have a wall. It will not prove that Communism works. It will not work out well at all. Now, look, I agree capitalism isn’t the be all and end all! Let me show you my last credit card bill. But you really need to put your thinking cap back on.
And then fifty years later, Cecilia wouldn’t have found this letter that was making her feel so . . . what was the word?
Unfocused. That was it.
She liked to feel focused. She was proud of her ability to focus. Her daily life was made up of a thousand tiny pieces – ‘Need coriander’, ‘Isabel’s haircut’, ‘Who will watch Polly at ballet on Tuesday while I take Esther to speech therapy?’ – like one of those giant jigsaws that Isabel used to spend hours doing. And yet Cecilia, who had no patience for puzzles, knew exactly where each tiny piece of her life belonged, and where it needed to be slotted in next.
And okay, maybe the life Cecilia was leading wasn’t that unusual or impressive. She was a school mum and a part-time Tupperware consultant, not an actress or an actuary or a . . . poet living in Vermont. (Cecilia had recently discovered that Liz Brogan, a girl from high school, was now a prize-winning poet living in Vermont. Liz, who ate cheese and Vegemite sandwiches and was always losing her bus pass. It took all of Cecilia’s considerable strength of character not to find that annoying. Not that she wanted to write poetry. But still. You would have thought that if anyone was going to lead an ordinary life it would have been Liz Brogan.) Of course, Cecilia had never aspired to anything other than ordinariness. Here I am, a typical suburban mum, she sometimes caught herself thinking, as if someone had accused her of holding herself out to be something else, something superior.
Other mothers talked about feeling overwhelmed, about the difficulties of focusing on one thing, and they were always saying, ‘How do you do it all, Cecilia?’, and she didn’t know how to answer them. She didn’t actually understand what they found so difficult.
But now, for some reason, everything felt somehow at risk. It wasn’t logical.
Maybe it wasn’t anything to do with the letter. Maybe it was hormonal. She was ‘possibly perimenopausal’, according to Dr McArthur. (‘Oh, I am not!’ Cecilia had said, automatically, as if responding to a gentle, humorous insult.)
Perhaps this was a case of that vague anxiety she knew some women experienced. Other women. She’d always thought anxious people were cute. Dear little anxious people like Sarah Sacks. She wanted to pat their worry-filled heads.
Perhaps if she opened the letter and saw that it was nothing she would get everything back in focus. She had things to do. Two baskets of laundry to fold. Three urgent phone calls to make. Gluten-free slice to bake for the gluten-intolerant members of the School Website Project Group (ie Janine Davidson) which would be meeting tomorrow.
There were other things beside the letter that could be making her feel anxious.
The sex thing, for example. That was always at the back of her mind.
She frowned and ran her hands down the sides of her waist. Her ‘oblique muscles’ according to her Pilates teacher. Oh, look, the sex thing was nothing. It was not actually on her mind. She refused to let it be on her mind. It was of no consequence.
It was true, perhaps, that ever since that morning last year she’d been aware of an underlying sense of fragility, a new understanding that a life of coriander and laundry could be stolen in an instant, that your ordinariness could vanish and suddenly you’re a woman on your knees, your face lifted to the sky and some women are running to help, but others are already averting their heads, with the words not articulated, but felt: Don’t let this touch me.
Cecilia saw it again for the thousandth time: Little Spiderman flying. She was one of the women who ran. Well, of course she was, throwing open her car door, even though she knew that nothing she did would make any difference. It wasn’t her school, her neighbourhood, her parish. None of her children had ever played with the little boy. She’d never had coffee with the woman on her knees. She just happened to be stopped at the lights on the other side of the intersection when it happened. A little boy, probably about five, dressed in a red and blue full-body Spiderman suit was waiting at the side of the road, holding his mother’s hand. It was Book Week. That’s why the little boy was dressed up. Cecilia was watching him, thinking, Mmmm, actually Spiderman is not a character from a book, when for no reason that she could see, the little boy dropped his mother’s hand and stepped off the kerb into the traffic. Cecilia screamed. She also, she remembered later, instinctively banged her fist on her horn.
If Cecilia had driven by just moments later she would have missed seeing it happen. Ten minutes later and the little boy’s death would have meant nothing more to her than another traffic detour. Now it was a memory that would probably cause her grandchildren to one day say, ‘Don’t hold my hand so tight, Grandma.’
Obviously there was no connection between little Spiderman and this letter.
He just came into her mind at strange times.
Cecilia flicked the letter across the table with her fingertip and picked up Esther’s library book: The Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall.
So, the Berlin Wall. Wonderful.
The first she’d known that the Berlin Wall was about to become a significant part of her life had been at breakfast this morning.
It had been just Cecilia and Esther sitting at the kitchen table. John-Paul was overseas, in Chicago until Friday, and Isabel and Polly were still asleep.
Cecilia didn’t normally sit down in the mornings. She generally ate her breakfast standing at the breakfast counter while she made lunches, checked her Tupperware orders on her iPad, unpacked the dishwasher, texted clients about their parties, whatever, but it was a rare opportunity to have some time alone with her odd, darling middle daughter, so she sat down with her Bircher muesli, while Esther powered her way through a bowl of rice bubbles, and waited.
She’d learned that with her daughters. Don’t say a word. Don’t ask a question. Give them enough time and they’d finally tell you what was on their mind. It was like fishing. It took silence and patience. (Or so she’d heard. Cecilia would rather hammer nails into her forehead than go fishing.)
Silence didn’t come naturally to her. Cecilia was a talker. ‘Seriously, do you ever shut the hell up?’ an ex-boyfriend had said to her once. She talked a lot when she was nervous. That ex-boyfriend must have made her nervous. Although, she also talked a lot when she was happy.
But she didn’t say anything that morning. She just ate, and waited, and sure enough, Esther started talking.
‘Mum,’ she said in her husky, precise little voice with its faint lisp. ‘Did you know that some people escaped over the Berlin Wall in a hot air balloon they made themselves?’
‘I did not know that,’ said Cecilia, although she might have known it.
So long Titanic, hello Berlin Wall, she thought.
She would have preferred it if Esther had shared something with her about how she was feeling at the moment, any worries she had about school, her friends, questions about sex, but no, she wanted to talk about the Berlin Wall.
Ever since Esther was three years old, she’d been developing these interests, or more accurately, obsessions. First it was dinosaurs. Sure, lots of kids are interested in dinosaurs, but Esther’s interest was, well, exhausting, to be frank, and a little peculiar. Nothing else interested the child. She drew dinosaurs, she played with dinosaurs, she dressed up as a dinosaur. ‘I’m not Esther,’ she’d say. ‘I’m T-Rex.’ Every bedtime story had to be about dinosaurs. Every conversation had to be related somehow to dinosaurs. It was lucky that John-Paul was interested, because Cecilia was bored after about five minutes. (They were extinct! They had nothing to say!) John-Paul took Esther on special trips to the museum. He brought home books for her. He sat with her for hours while they talked about herbivores and carnivores.
Since then Esther’s ‘interests’ had ranged from roller-coasters to cane toads. Most recently it had been the Titanic. Now she was ten she was old enough to do her own research at the library and online, and Cecilia was amazed at the information she gathered. What ten year old lay in bed reading historical books that were so big and chunky she could barely hold them up?
‘Encourage it!’ her schoolteachers said, but sometimes Cecilia worried. It seemed to her that Esther was possibly a touch autistic, or at least sitting somewhere on the autism spectrum. Cecilia’s mother had laughed when she’d mentioned her concern. ‘But Esther is exactly like you were!’ she said. (This was not true. Keeping your Barbie doll collection in perfect order hardly compared.)
‘I actually have a piece of the Berlin Wall,’ Cecilia had said that morning to Esther, suddenly remembering this fact, and it had been gratifying to see Esther’s eyes light up with interest. ‘I was there in Germany, after the Wall came down.’
‘Can I see it?’ asked Esther.
‘You can have it, darling.’
Jewellery and clothes for Isabel and Polly. A piece of the Berlin Wall for Esther.
Cecilia, twenty years old at the time, had been on a six-week holiday travelling through Europe with her friend Sarah Sacks in 1990, just a few months after the announcement that the Wall was coming down. (Sarah’s famous indecisiveness paired with Cecilia’s famous decisiveness made them the perfect travelling companions. No conflict whatsoever.)
When they got to Berlin, they found tourists lined along the Wall, trying to chip off pieces as souvenirs, using keys, rocks, anything they could find. The Wall was like the giant carcass of a dragon that had once terrorised the city, and the tourists were crows pecking away at its remains.
Without any tools it was almost impossible to chip off a proper piece, so Cecilia and Sarah decided (well, Cecilia decided) to buy their pieces from the enterprising locals who had set out rugs and were selling off a variety of offerings. Capitalism really had triumphed. You could buy anything from grey-coloured chips the size of marbles to giant boulder-sized chunks complete with spray-painted graffiti.
Cecilia couldn’t remember how much she’d paid for the tiny grey stone that looked like it could have come from anyone’s front garden. ‘It probably did,’ said Sarah as they caught the train out of Berlin that night, and they’d laughed at their own gullibility, but at least they’d felt like they were a part of history. Cecilia had put her chip in a paper bag and written MY PIECE OF THE BERLIN WALL on the front, and when she got back to Australia she’d thrown it in a box with all the other souvenirs she’d collected: drink coasters, train tickets, menus, foreign coins, hotel keys.
Cecilia wished now she’d concentrated more on the Wall, taken more photos, collected more anecdotes she could have shared with Esther. Actually, what she remembered most about that trip to Berlin was kissing a handsome brown-haired German boy in a nightclub. He kept taking ice cubes from his drink and running them across her collarbone, which at the time had seemed incredibly erotic, but now seemed unhygienic and sticky.
If only she’d been the sort of curious, politically aware girl who struck up conversations with the locals about what it was like living in the shadow of the Wall. Instead, all she had to share with her daughter were stories about kissing and ice cubes. Of course, Isabel and Polly would love to hear about the kissing and ice cubes. Or Polly would, maybe Isabel had reached the age where the thought of her mother kissing anybody would be appalling.
Cecilia put Find piece of Berlin Wall for E on her list of things to do that day (there were twenty-five items – she used an iPhone app to list them), and at about two pm, she went into the attic to find it.
Attic was probably too generous a word for the storage area in their roof space. You reached it by pulling down a ladder from a trapdoor in the ceiling.
Once she was up there, she had to keep her knees bent so as not to bang her head. John-Paul point-blank refused to go up there. He suffered from severe claustrophobia and walked six flights of stairs every day to his office so he could avoid taking the lift. The poor man had regular nightmares about being trapped in a room where the walls were contracting. ‘The walls!’ he’d shout, just before he woke up, sweaty and wild-eyed. ‘Do you think you were locked in a cupboard as a child?’ Cecilia had asked him once (she wouldn’t have put it past his mother), but he’d said he was pretty sure he hadn’t. ‘Actually, John-Paul never had nightmares when he was a little boy,’ his mother had told Cecilia when she’d asked. ‘He was a beautiful sleeper. Perhaps you give him too much rich food late at night?’ Cecilia had got used to the nightmares now.
The attic was small and crammed, but tidy and well organised, of course. Over recent years, ‘organised’ seemed to have become her most defining characteristic. It was like she was a minor celebrity with this one claim to fame. It was funny how once it became a thing her family and friends commented on and teased her about, then it seemed to perpetuate itself, so that her life was now extraordinarily well organised, as if motherhood was a sport and she was a top athlete. It was like she was thinking, How far can I go with this? How much more can I fit in my life without losing control?
And that was why other people, like her sister Bridget, had rooms full of dusty junk, whereas Cecilia’s attic was stacked with clearly labelled white plastic storage containers. The only part that didn’t look quite ‘Cecilia-ish’ was the tower of shoeboxes in the corner. They were John-Paul’s. He liked to keep each financial year’s receipts in a different shoebox. It was something he’d been doing for years, before he met Cecilia. He was proud of his shoeboxes, so she managed to restrain herself from telling him that a filing cabinet would be a far more effective use of space.
Thanks to her labelled storage containers, she found her piece of the Berlin Wall almost straightaway. She peeled off the lid of the container marked Cecilia: Travel/Souvenirs. 1985–1990 and there it was in its faded brown paper bag. Her little piece of history. She took out the piece of rock (cement?) and held it in her palm. It was even smaller than she remembered. It didn’t look especially impressive, but hopefully it would be enough for the reward of one of Esther’s rare, lopsided little smiles. You had to work hard for a smile from Esther.
Then Cecilia let herself get distracted (yes, she achieved a lot every day but she wasn’t a machine, she did sometimes fritter away a little time) looking through the box, and laughing at the photo of herself with the German boy who did the ice-cube thing. He, like her piece of the Berlin Wall, wasn’t quite as impressive as she remembered. Then the house phone rang, startling her out of the past, and she stood up too fast and banged the side of her head painfully against the ceiling. The walls, the walls! She swore, reeled back and her elbow knocked against John-Paul’s tower of shoeboxes.
At least three lost their lids and their contents, causing a mini-landslide of paperwork. This was precisely why the shoeboxes were not such a good idea.
Cecilia swore again, and rubbed her head, which really did hurt. She looked at the shoeboxes and saw that they were all for financial years dating back to the eighties. She began stuffing the pile of receipts into one of the boxes, when her eye was caught by her own name on a white business envelope.
She picked it up and saw that it was John-Paul’s handwriting.
It said:
For my wife, Cecilia Fitzpatrick
To be opened only in the event of my death
She laughed out loud, and then abruptly stopped, as if she was at a party and she’d laughed at something somebody had said and then realised that it wasn’t a joke, it was actually quite serious.
She read it again – For my wife, Cecilia Fitzpatrick – and, oddly, for just a moment, she felt her cheeks go warm, as if she was embarrassed. For him or for her? She wasn’t sure. It felt like she’d stumbled upon something shameful, as if she’d caught him masturbating in the shower. (Miriam Openheimer had once caught Doug masturbating in the shower. It was just so dreadful that they all knew this, but once Miriam was on to her second glass of champagne the secrets just bubbled out of her, and once they knew about this it was impossible to unknow it.)
What did it say? She considered tearing it open right that second, before she had time to think about it, like the way she sometimes (not very often) shoved the last biscuit or chocolate in her mouth, before her conscience had time to catch up with her greed.
The phone rang again. She wasn’t wearing her watch, and suddenly she felt like she’d lost all sense of time.
She threw the rest of the paperwork back into one of the shoeboxes and took the piece of the Berlin Wall and the letter downstairs.
As soon as she left the attic, she was picked up and swept along by the fast-running current of her life. There was a big Tupperware order to deliver, the girls to be picked up from school, the fish to be bought for tonight’s dinner (they ate a lot of fish when John-Paul was away for work because he hated it), phone calls to return. The parish priest, Father Joe, had been calling to remind her that it was Sister Ursula’s funeral tomorrow. There seemed to be some concern about numbers. She would go, of course. She left John-Paul’s mysterious letter on top of the fridge and gave Esther the piece of the Berlin Wall just before they sat down for dinner.
‘Thank you,’ Esther handled the little piece of rock with touching reverence. ‘Exactly which part of the Wall did it come from?’
‘Well, I think it was quite near Checkpoint Charlie,’ said Cecilia with jolly confidence. She had no idea.
But I can tell you that the boy with the ice cube wore a red T-shirt and white jeans and he picked up my ponytail and held it between his fingertips and said, ‘Very pretty’.
‘Is it worth any money?’ asked Polly.
‘I doubt it. How could you prove it really was from the Wall?’ asked Isabel. ‘It just looks like a piece of rock.’
‘DMA testing,’ said Polly. The child watched far too much television.
‘It’s DNA not DMA and it comes from people,’ said Esther.
‘I know that!’ Polly had arrived in the world outraged to discover that her sisters had got there before her.
‘Well then why –’
‘So who do you reckon is going to get voted off The Biggest Loser tonight?’ asked Cecilia, while simultaneously thinking, Why, yes, whoever you are who is observing my life, I am changing the subject from a fascinating period of modern history that might actually teach my children something to a trashy television show that will teach them nothing but will keep the peace and not make my head hurt. If John-Paul had been at home, she probably wouldn’t have changed the subject. She was a far better mother when she had an audience.
The girls had talked about The Biggest Loser for the rest of dinner, while Cecilia had pretended to be interested and thought about the letter sitting on top of the fridge. Once the table had been cleared and the girls were all watching TV she’d taken it down to stare at it.
Now she put down her cup of tea and held the envelope up to the light, half-laughing at herself. It looked like a handwritten letter on lined notebook paper. She couldn’t decipher a word.
Had John-Paul perhaps seen something on television about how the soldiers in Afghanistan wrote letters to their families to be sent in the event of their deaths, like messages from the grave, and had he thought that it might be nice to do something similar?
She just couldn’t imagine him sitting down to do such a thing. It was so sentimental.
Lovely though. If he died, he wanted them to know how much he loved them.
. . . in the event of my death. Why was he thinking about death? Was he sick? But this letter appeared to have been written a long time ago, and he was still alive. Besides, he’d had a check-up a few weeks ago and Dr Kluger had said he was as ‘fit as a stallion’. He’d spent the next few days tossing his head back and whinnying and neighing around the house, while Polly rode on his back swinging a tea towel around her head like a whip.
Cecilia smiled at the memory and her anxiety dissipated. So a few years ago John-Paul had done something uncharacteristically sentimental and written this letter. It was nothing to get all worked up about, and of course she shouldn’t open it just for the sake of curiosity.
She looked at the clock. Nearly eight pm. He’d be calling soon. He generally called around this time each night when he was away.
She wasn’t even going to mention the letter to him. It would embarrass him and it wasn’t really an appropriate topic of conversation for the phone.
One thing: how exactly was she meant to have found this letter if he had died? She might never have found it! Why hadn’t he given it to their solicitor, Miriam’s husband, Doug Openheimer? So difficult not to think of him in the shower every time he came to mind. Of course it had no bearing on his abilities as a lawyer, perhaps it said more about Miriam’s abilities in the bedroom. (Cecilia had a mildly competitive relationship with Miriam.)
Of course, given the current circumstances, now was not the time to be feeling smug about sex. Stop it. Do not think about the sex thing.
Anyway, it was dumb of John-Paul not to have given the letter to Doug. If he’d died she probably would have thrown out all his shoeboxes in one of her decluttering frenzies without even bothering to go through them. If he’d wanted her to find the letter it was crazy to just shove it in a random shoebox.
Why not put it in the file with the copies of their wills, life insurance and so on?
John-Paul was one of the smartest people she knew, except for when it came to the logistics of life.
‘I seriously don’t understand how men came to rule the world,’ she’d said to her sister Bridget this morning, after she’d told her about how John-Paul had lost his rental car keys in Chicago. It had driven Cecilia bananas seeing that text message from him. There was nothing she could do! He didn’t expect her to do anything, but still!
This type of thing was always happening to John-Paul. Last time he’d gone overseas he’d left his laptop in a cab. The man lost things constantly. Wallets, phones, keys, his wedding ring. His possessions just slid right off him.
‘They’re pretty good at building stuff,’ her sister had said. ‘Like bridges and roads. I mean, could you even build a hut? Your basic mud hut?’
‘I could build a hut,’ said Cecilia.
‘You probably could,’ groaned Bridget, as if this was a failing. ‘Anyway, men don’t rule the world. We have a female prime minister. And you rule your world. You rule the Fitzpatrick household. You rule St Angela’s. You rule the world of Tupperware.’
Cecilia was President of St Angela’s Primary Parents and Citizens Association. She was also the eleventh top-selling Tupperware consultant in Australia. Her sister found both of these roles hugely comical.
‘I don’t rule the Fitzpatrick household,’ said Cecilia.
‘Sure you don’t,’ guffawed Bridget.
It was true that if Cecilia died the Fitzpatrick household would just, well – it was unbearable to think about what would happen. John-Paul would need more than a letter from her. He’d need a whole manual, including a floor plan of the house pointing out the location of the laundry and the linen cupboard.
The phone rang and she snatched it up.
‘Let me guess. Our daughters are watching the chubby people, right?’ said John-Paul. She’d always loved his voice on the phone: deep, warm and comforting. Oh yes, her husband was hopeless, and lost things and ran late, but he took care of his wife and daughters in that old-fashioned, responsible, I-am-the-man-and-this-is-my-job way. Bridget was right, Cecilia ruled her world, but she’d always known that if there was a crisis – a crazed gunman, a flood, a fire – John-Paul would be the one to save their lives. He’d throw himself in front of the bullet, build the raft, drive them safely through the raging inferno, and once that was done, he’d hand back control to Cecilia, pat his pockets and say, ‘Has anyone seen my wallet?’
After she saw the little Spiderman die the first thing she did was call John-Paul, her fingers shaking as she pressed the buttons.
‘I found this letter,’ said Cecilia now. She ran her fingertips over his handwriting on the front of the envelope. As soon as she heard his voice she knew she was going to ask him about it that very second. They’d been married for fifteen years. There had never been secrets.
‘What letter?’
‘A letter from you,’ said Cecilia. She was trying to sound light, jokey, so that this whole situation would stay in the right perspective, so that whatever was in the letter would mean nothing, would change nothing. ‘To me, to be opened in the event of your death.’ It was impossible to use the words ‘event of your death’ to your husband without your voice coming out odd.
There was silence. For a moment she thought they’d been cut off except that she could hear a gentle hum of chatter and clatter in the background. It sounded like he was calling from a restaurant.
Her stomach contracted.
‘John-Paul?’
chapter two
‘If this is a joke,’ said Tess, ‘it’s not funny.’ Will put his hand on her arm. Felicity put her hand on her other arm. They were like matching bookends holding her up.
‘We’re so very, very sorry,’ said Felicity.
‘So sorry,’ echoed Will, as if they were singing a duet together.
They were sitting at the big round wooden table they sometimes used for client meetings, but mostly for eating pizza. Will’s face was dead white. Tess could see each tiny black hair of his stubble in sharp definition, standing upright, like some sort of miniature crop growing across his shockingly white skin. Felicity had three distinct red blotches on her neck.
For a moment Tess was transfixed by those three blotches, as if they held the answer. They looked like fingerprints on Felicity’s newly slender neck. Finally, Tess raised her eyes and saw that Felicity’s eyes – her famously beautiful almond-shaped green eyes: ‘The fat girl has such beautiful eyes!’ – were red and watery.
‘So this realisation,’ said Tess. ‘This realisation that you two –’ She stopped. Swallowed.
‘We want you to know that nothing has actually happened,’ interrupted Felicity.
‘We haven’t – you know,’ said Will.
‘You haven’t slept together.’ Tess saw that they were both proud of this, that they almost expected her to admire them for their constraint.
‘Absolutely not,’ said Will.
‘But you want to,’ said Tess. She was almost laughing at the absurdity of it. ‘That’s what you’re telling me, right? You want to sleep together.’
They must have kissed. That was worse than if they’d slept together. Everyone knew that a stolen kiss was the most erotic thing in the world.
The blotches on Felicity’s neck began to slink up her jawline. She looked like she was coming down with a rare infectious disease.
‘We’re so sorry,’ said Will again. ‘We tried so hard to – to make it not happen.’
‘We really did,’ said Felicity. ‘For months, you know, we just –’
‘Months? This has been going on for months!’
‘Nothing has actually gone on,’ intoned Will, as solemnly as if he was in church.
‘Well, something has gone on,’ said Tess. ‘Something rather significant has gone on.’ Who knew she was capable of speaking with such hardness? Each word sounded like a block of concrete.
‘Sorry,’ said Will. ‘Of course – I just meant – you know.’
Felicity pressed her fingertips to her forehead and began to weep. ‘Oh Tess.’
Tess’s hand went out of its own accord to comfort her. They were closer than sisters. She always told people that. Their mothers were twins, and Felicity and Tess were only children, born within six months of each other. They’d done everything together.
Tess had once punched a boy – a proper closed-fist right hook across the jaw – because he’d called Felicity a baby elephant, which was exactly what Felicity had looked like all through her school days. Felicity had grown into a fat adult, ‘a big girl with a pretty face’. She drank Coke like it was water, and never dieted or exercised or seemed particularly bothered by her weight. And then, about six months ago, Felicity had joined Weight Watchers, given up Coke, joined a gym, lost forty kilos and turned beautiful. Extremely beautiful. She was exactly the type of person they wanted for that Biggest Loser show: a stunning woman trapped in a fat person’s body.
Tess had been thrilled for her. ‘Maybe she’ll meet someone really nice now,’ she’d said to Will. ‘Now she’s got more confidence.’
It seemed that Felicity had met someone really nice. Will. The nicest man Tess knew. That took a lot of confidence, to steal your cousin’s husband.
‘I’m so sorry I just want to die,’ wept Felicity.
Tess pulled back her hand. Felicity – snarky, sarcastic, funny, clever, fat Felicity – sounded like an American cheerleader.
Will tipped his head back and stared at the ceiling with a clenched jaw. He was trying not to cry too. The last time Tess had seen him cry was when Liam was born.
Tess’s eyes were dry. Her heart hammered as if she was terrified, as if her life was in danger. The phone rang.
‘Leave it,’ said Will. ‘It’s after hours.’
Tess stood, went over to her desk and picked up the phone.
‘TWF Advertising,’ she said.
‘Tess, my love, I know it’s late, but we’ve got us a little problem.’
It was Dirk Freeman, Marketing Director of Petra Pharmaceuticals, their most important and lucrative client. It was Tess’s job to make Dirk feel important, to reassure him that although he was fifty-six and was never going to climb any higher in the ranks of senior management, he was the big kahuna, and Tess was his servant, his maid, his lowly chambermaid in fact, and he could tell her what to do, and be flirty, or grumpy, or stern, and she’d pretend to give him a bit of lip, but when it came down to it, she had to do what he said. It had occurred to her recently that the service she was providing Dirk Freeman bordered on sexual.
‘The colour of the dragon on the Cough Stop packaging is all wrong,’ said Dirk. ‘It’s too purple. Much too purple. Have we gone to print?’
Yes, they’d gone to print. Fifty thousand little cardboard boxes had rolled off the presses that day. Fifty thousand perfectly purple, toothily grinning dragons.
The work that had gone into those dragons. The emails, the discussions. And while Tess had been talking about dragons, Will and Felicity had been falling in love.
‘No,’ said Tess, her eyes on her husband and cousin who were both still sitting at the meeting table in the centre of the room, their heads bowed, examining their fingertips, like teenagers on detention. ‘It’s your lucky day, Dirk.’
‘Oh, I thought it would have – well, good.’ He could barely hide his disappointment. He’d wanted Tess all breathless and worried. He’d wanted to hear the tremor of panic in her voice.
His voiced deepened, became as abrupt and authoritative as if he was about to lead his troops onto the battlefield. ‘I need you to hold everything on Cough Stop, right? The lot. Got it?’
‘Got it. Hold everything on Cough Stop.’
‘I’ll get back to you.’
He hung up. There was nothing wrong with the colour. He’d call back the next day and say it was fine. He’d just needed to feel powerful for a few moments. One of the younger hot shots had probably made him feel inferior in a meeting.
‘The Cough Stop boxes went to print today,’ Felicity turned in her seat and looked worriedly at Tess.
‘It’s fine,’ said Tess.
‘But if he’s going to change –’ said Will.
‘I said it’s fine.’
She didn’t feel angry yet. Not really. But she could feel the possibility of a fury worse than anything she’d ever experienced, a simmering vat of anger that could explode like a fireball, destroying everything in its vicinity.
She didn’t sit down again. Instead she turned and examined the whiteboard where they recorded all their work in progress.
Cough Stop packaging!
Feathermart press ad!!
Bedstuff website :)
It was humiliating to see her own scrawly, carefree, confident handwriting with its flippant exclamation marks. The smiley face next to the Bedstuff website, because they’d worked so hard to get that job, pitching against bigger companies, and then, yes! They’d won it. She’d drawn that smiley face yesterday, when she had been ignorant of the secret that Will and Felicity were sharing. Had they exchanged rueful looks behind her back when she’d drawn the smiley face? She won’t be so smiley-faced once we confess our little secret, will she?
The phone rang again.
This time Tess let it go to the answering service.
TWF Advertising. Their names entwined together to form their little dream business. The idle ‘what if’ conversation they’d actually made happen.
The Christmas before last they’d been in Sydney for the holiday. As was traditional, they’d spent Christmas Eve at Felicity’s parents’ house. Tess’s Auntie Mary and Uncle Phil. Felicity was still fat. Pretty and pink and perspiring in a size 22 dress. They’d had the traditional sausages on the barbecue, the traditional creamy pasta salad, the traditional pavlova. Felicity and Will had both been whingeing about their jobs. Incompetent management. Stupid colleagues. Draughty offices. And so on and so forth.
‘Jeez, you’re a miserable bunch, aren’t you,’ said Uncle Phil, who didn’t have anything to whinge about now he was retired.
‘Why don’t you go into business together?’ said Tess’s mother.
It was true that they were all in similar fields. Tess was the marketing communications manager for a but-this-is-the-way-we’ve-always-done-it legal publishing company. Will was the creative director of a large, prestigious extremely-pleased-with-themselves advertising agency. (That’s how they’d met; Tess had been Will’s client.) Felicity was a graphic designer working for a tyrant.
Once they started talking about it, the ideas fell into place so fast. Click, click, click! By the time they were eating the last mouthfuls of pavlova, it was all set. Will would be the creative director! Obviously! Felicity would be the art director! Of course! Tess would be the business manager! That one wasn’t quite so obvious. She’d never held a role like that. She’d always been on the client side, and she considered herself something of a social introvert.
In fact, a few weeks ago she’d done a Reader’s Digest quiz in a doctor’s waiting room called ‘Do you suffer from Social Anxiety?’ and her answers (all ‘C’s) confirmed that she did, in fact, suffer from social anxiety and should seek professional help or ‘join a support group’. Everybody who did that quiz probably got the same result. If you didn’t suspect you had social anxiety, you wouldn’t bother doing the quiz; you’d be too busy chatting with the receptionist.
She certainly did not seek professional help, or tell a single soul. Not Will. Not even Felicity. If she talked about it, then it would make it real. The two of them would watch her in social situations and be kindly empathetic when they saw the humiliating evidence of her shyness. The important thing was to cover it up. When she was a child her mother had once told her shyness was almost a form of selfishness. ‘You see, when you hang your head like that, darling, people think you don’t like them!’ Tess had taken that to heart. She grew up and learned how to make small talk with a thumping heart. She forced herself to make eye contact, even when her nerves were screaming at her to look away, look away! ‘Bit of a cold,’ she’d say, to explain away the dryness of her throat. She learned to live with it, the way other people learned to live with lactose intolerance or sensitive skin.
Anyway, Tess hadn’t been overly concerned that Christmas Eve two years ago. It was all just talk and they’d been drinking a lot of Auntie Mary’s punch. They weren’t really going to start a business together. She wouldn’t really have to be the account director.
But then, in the New Year, when they got back to Melbourne, Will and Felicity kept going on about it. Will and Tess’s house had a huge downstairs area that the previous owners had used as a ‘teenagers’ retreat’. It had its own separate entrance. What did they have to lose? The start-up costs would be negligible. Will and Tess had been putting extra money on their mortgage. Felicity was sharing a flat. If they failed, they could all go back out and get jobs.
Tess was swept along on the wave of their enthusiasm. She was happy enough to resign from her job, but the first time she sat outside a potential client’s office she had to cram her hands between her knees to stop them trembling. Often she could actually feel her head wobbling. Even now, after eighteen months, she still suffered debilitating nerves each time she met a new client. Yet she was oddly successful in her role. ‘You’re different from other agency people,’ one client told her at the end of their first meeting as he shook her hand to seal the deal. ‘You actually listen more than you talk.’
The horrible nerves were balanced by the glorious euphoria she felt each time she walked out of a meeting. It was like walking on air. She’d done it again. She’d battled the monster and won. And best of all, nobody suspected her secret. She brought in the clients. The business flourished. A product launch they did for a cosmetics company had even been nominated for a marketing award.
Tess’s role meant that she was often out of the office, leaving Will and Felicity alone for hours at a time. If someone had asked her whether that worried her, she would have laughed. ‘Felicity is like a sister to Will,’ she would have said.
She turned from the whiteboard. Her legs felt weak. She went and sat back down, choosing a chair at the other end of the table from them. She tried to get her bearings.
It was six o’clock on a Monday night. She was right in the middle of her life.
There had been so many other things distracting her when Will came upstairs and said he and Felicity needed to talk to her about something. Tess had just got off the phone from her mother, who had rung to say she’d broken her ankle playing tennis. She was going to be on crutches for the next eight weeks and she was very sorry, but could Easter be in Sydney instead of Melbourne this year?
It was the first time in the fifteen years since Tess and Felicity had moved interstate that Tess had felt bad about not living closer to her mother.
‘We’ll get a flight straight after school on Thursday,’ Tess had said. ‘Can you cope until then?’
‘Oh, I’ll be fine. Mary will help. And the neighbours.’
But Auntie Mary didn’t drive, and Uncle Phil couldn’t be expected to drive her over every day. Besides, Mary and Phil were both starting to look frail themselves. And Tess’s mother’s neighbours were ancient old ladies or busy young families who barely had time to wave hello as they backed their big cars out of their driveways. It didn’t seem likely that they’d be bringing over casseroles.
Tess had been fretting over whether she should book a flight to Sydney for the very next day, and then perhaps organise a home helper for her mother. Lucy would hate to have a stranger in the house, but how would she shower? How would she cook?
It was tricky. They had so much work on, and she didn’t like to leave Liam. He wasn’t quite himself. There was a boy in his class, Marcus, who was giving him grief. He wasn’t exactly bullying him. That would have been nice and clear cut and they could have followed the school’s sternly bullet-pointed ‘We Take A Zero-Tolerance Approach to Bullying’ Code of Practice. Marcus was more complicated than that. He was a charming little psychopath.
Something new and awful had gone on with Marcus that day at school, Tess was sure of it. She’d been giving Liam his dinner while Will and Felicity were downstairs working. Most nights she and Will and Liam, and often Felicity too, managed to eat as a family, but the Bedstuff website was meant to go live that Friday, so they were all working long hours.
Liam had been quieter than usual while he was eating his dinner. He was a dreamy, reflective little boy, he’d never been a chatterbox, but there was something so grown-up and sad about the way he mechanically speared each piece of sausage with his fork and dunked it in the tomato sauce.
‘Did you play with Marcus today?’ Tess asked.
‘Nah,’ said Liam. ‘Today’s Monday.’
‘So what?’
But he’d closed down and refused to say another word about it, and Tess had felt rage fill her heart. She needed to talk to his teacher again. She had the strongest feeling that her child was in an abusive relationship and nobody could see it. The school playground was like a battlefield.
That’s what had been on Tess’s mind when Will had asked her if she’d come downstairs: her mother’s ankle and Marcus.
Will and Felicity had been sitting at the meeting table waiting for her. Before Tess had joined them, she’d collected all the coffee mugs that had been sitting around the office. Felicity had a habit of making herself fresh cups of coffee that she never finished. Tess put the mugs in a row on the meeting table and said, as she sat down, ‘New record, Felicity. Five half-drunk cups.’
Felicity didn’t say anything. She looked oddly at Tess, as if she felt really bad about the coffee cups, and then Will made his extraordinary announcement.
‘Tess, I don’t know how to say this,’ he said, ‘but Felicity and I have fallen in love.’
‘Very funny.’ Tess grouped the coffee cups together and smiled. ‘Hilarious.’
But it seemed it wasn’t a joke.
Now she put her hands on the honey-gold pine of the table and stared at them. Her pale, blue-veined, knuckly hands. An ex-boyfriend, she couldn’t remember which, had once told her that he was in love with her hands. Will had had a lot of trouble getting the ring over her knuckle at their wedding. Their guests had laughed softly. Will had pretended to exhale with relief once he got it on, while he secretly caressed her hand.
Tess looked up and saw Will and Felicity exchange covert worried glances.
‘So it’s true love, is it?’ said Tess. ‘You’re soul mates, are you?’
A nerve throbbed in Will’s cheek. Felicity tugged at her hair.
Yes. That’s what they were both thinking. Yes, it is true love. Yes, we are soul mates.
‘When exactly did this start?’ she asked. ‘When did these “feelings” between you develop?’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Will hurriedly.
‘It matters to me!’ Tess’s voice rose.
‘I guess, I’m not sure, maybe about six months ago?’ mumbled Felicity, looking at the table.
‘So when you started to lose weight?’ said Tess.
Felicity shrugged.
Tess said to Will, ‘Funny that you never looked twice at her when she was fat.’
The bitter taste of nastiness flooded her mouth. How long since she’d let herself say something so cruel? Not since she was a teenager.
She had never called Felicity fat. Never said a critical word about her weight.
‘Tess, please –’ said Will without any censure in his voice, just a soft, desperate pleading.
‘It’s fine,’ said Felicity. ‘I deserve it. We deserve it.’ She lifted her chin and looked at Tess with naked, brave humility.
So Tess was going to be allowed to kick and scratch as much as she wanted. They were just going to sit there and take it for as long as it took. They weren’t going to fight back. Will and Felicity were fundamentally good. She knew this. They were good people and that’s why they were going to be so nice about this, so understanding and accepting of Tess’s rage, so that in the end Tess would be the bad person, not them. They hadn’t actually slept together, they hadn’t betrayed her. They’d fallen in love! It wasn’t an ordinary grubby little affair. It was fate. Predestined. Nobody could think that badly of them.
It was genius.
‘Why didn’t you tell me on your own?’ Tess tried to lock eyes with Will, as if the strength of her gaze could bring him back from wherever he’d gone. His eyes, his strange hazel eyes, the colour of beaten copper, with thick black eyelashes, eyes that were so different from Tess’s own run-of-the-mill pale blue ones, the eyes that her son had inherited and Tess thought of as somehow belonging to her now, a beloved possession for which she gracefully accepted compliments – ‘Your son has lovely eyes.’ ‘He gets them from my husband. Nothing to do with me.’ But everything to do with her. Hers. They were hers. Will’s gold eyes were normally amused, he was always ready to laugh at the world, he found day-to-day life generally pretty funny, it was one of the things she loved about him most, but right now they were looking at her imploringly, the way Liam looked at her when he wanted something at the supermarket.
Please Mum, I want that sugary treat with all the preservatives and the cleverly branded packaging and I know I promised I wouldn’t ask for anything but I want it.
Please Tess, I want your delicious-looking cousin and I know I promised to be true to you in good times and bad, in sickness and health, but pleeeease.
No. You may not have her. I said no.
‘We couldn’t work out the right time or the right place,’ said Will. ‘And we both wanted to tell you. We couldn’t – and then we just thought, we couldn’t go any longer without you knowing – so we just . . .’ His jaw shifted, turkey-like, in and out, back and forth. ‘We thought there would never be a good time for a conversation like this.’
We. They were a ‘we’. They’d talked about this. Without her. Well, of course they’d talked without her. They’d ‘fallen in love’ without her.
‘I thought I should be here too,’ said Felicity.
‘Did you now?’ said Tess. She couldn’t bear to look at Felicity. ‘So what happens next?’
Asking the question filled her with a fresh nauseous wave of disbelief. Surely nothing was going to happen. Surely Felicity would rush off to one of her new gym classes and Will would come upstairs and talk to Liam while he had his bath, maybe get to the bottom of the Marcus problem, while Tess cooked a stir-fry for dinner; she had the ingredients ready, it was too bizarre, thinking of the little plastic-wrapped tray of chicken strips sitting staidly in the refrigerator. Surely she and Will were still going to have a glass of that half-empty bottle of wine and talk about potential men for the brand-new beautiful Felicity. They’d already canvassed so many possibilities. Their Italian bank manager. The big quiet guy who owned their local deli. Never once had Will slapped his hand to his forehead and said, ‘Of course! How could I have missed it? Me! I’d be perfect for her!’
It was a joke. She couldn’t stop thinking that the whole thing was a joke.
‘We know nothing can make this easy, or right, or better,’ said Will. ‘But we’ll do whatever you want, whatever you think is right for you and for Liam.’
‘For Liam,’ repeated Tess, dumbstruck.
For some reason it hadn’t occurred to her that Liam would have to be told about this, that Liam would have anything to do with it, or be in any way affected. Liam who was upstairs right now, lying on his stomach, watching television, his little six-year-old mind filled with giant-sized worries of Marcus.
No, she thought. No, no, no. Absolutely not.
She saw her mother appearing at her bedroom door. ‘Daddy and I want to talk to you about something.’
It would not happen to Liam the way it had happened to her. Over her dead body. Her beautiful, grave-faced little boy would not feel the loss and confusion she’d felt that awful summer all those years ago. He would not pack a little overnight bag every second Friday. He would not have to check a calendar on the refrigerator to see where he was sleeping each weekend. He would not learn to think before his spoke whenever one parent asked a seemingly innocuous question about the other.
Her mind raced.
All that mattered now was Liam. Her own feelings were irrelevant. How could she save this? How could she stop it?
‘We never, ever meant for this to happen.’ Will’s eyes were big and guileless. ‘And we want to do this the right way. The best way for all of us. We even wondered –’
Tess saw Felicity shake her head slightly at Will.
‘You’d even wondered what?’ said Tess. Here was more evidence of their talking. She could imagine the enjoyable intensity of these conversations. Teary eyes demonstrating what good people they were, how they were suffering at the thought of hurting Tess, but what choice did they have in the face of their passion, their love?
‘It’s too soon to talk about what we’re going to do.’ Felicity’s voice was firmer suddenly. Tess’s fingernails dug into her palms. How dare she? How dare she talk in her normal voice, as if this was a normal situation, a normal problem.
‘You even wondered what?’ Tess kept her eyes on Will.
Forget about Felicity, she told herself. You don’t have time to feel angry. Think, Tess, think.
Will’s face went from white to red. ‘We wondered if it would be possible for all of us to live together. Here. For Liam’s sake. It’s not like this is a normal break-up. We’re all . . . family. So that’s why we thought, I mean, maybe it’s crazy, but we just thought it might be possible. Eventually.’
Tess guffawed. A hard, almost guttural sound. Were they out of their minds? ‘You mean, I just move out of my bedroom and Felicity moves in? So we just say to Liam, “Don’t worry, honey, Daddy sleeps with Felicity now and Mummy is in the spare room?”’
Felicity looked mortified. ‘Of course not.’
‘When you put it like that –’ began Will.
‘But what other way is there to put it?’
Will exhaled. He leaned forward. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘We don’t need to work anything out right this second.’ Sometimes Will used a particularly masculine, reasonable but authoritative tone in the office when he wanted things done a certain way. Tess and Felicity gave him absolute hell about it. He was using that tone now, as if it were time to get things under control.
How dare he.
Tess lifted her closed fists and slammed them down so hard on the table that it rattled. She’d never done such a thing before. It felt farcical and absurd and somewhat thrilling. She was pleased to see both Will and Felicity flinch.
‘I’ll tell you what’s going to happen,’ she said, because all at once it was perfectly clear.
It was simple.
Will and Felicity needed to have a proper affair. The sooner the better. This smouldering thing they had going had to run its course. At the moment it was sweet and sexy. They were star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet gazing soulfully at each other over the purple Cough Stop dragon. It needed to get sweaty and sticky and sleazy and eventually, hopefully, God willing, banal and dull. Will loved his son, and once the fog of lust cleared, he’d see that he’d made a ghastly but not irretrievable mistake.
This could all be fixed.
The only way forward was for Tess to leave. Right now.
‘Liam and I will go and stay in Sydney,’ she said. ‘With Mum. She called just a minute ago to say she’s broken her ankle. She needs someone there to help her.’
‘Oh no! How? Is she okay?’ said Felicity.
Tess ignored her. Felicity didn’t get to be the caring niece any more. She was the other woman. Tess was the wife. And she was going to fight this. For Liam’s sake. She would fight it and she would win.
‘We’ll stay with her until her ankle is better.’
‘But, Tess, you can’t take Liam to live in Sydney.’ Will’s bossy tone vanished. He was a Melbourne boy. There had never been any question that they would live anywhere else.
He looked at Tess with a wounded expression, as if he were Liam being unjustly told off for something. Then his brow cleared. ‘What about school?’ he said. ‘He can’t miss school.’
‘He can go to St Angela’s for a term. He needs to get away from Marcus. This will be good for him. A complete change of scenery. He can walk to school like I did.’
‘You wouldn’t be able to get him in,’ said Will frantically. ‘He’s not Catholic!’
‘Who says he’s not Catholic?’ said Tess. ‘He’s baptised in the Catholic Church.’
Felicity opened her mouth and shut it again.
‘I’ll get him in,’ said Tess. She had no idea how hard it would be to get him in. ‘Mum knows people at the church.’
As Tess spoke, images of St Angela’s, the tiny local Catholic school she and Felicity had both attended, filled her head. Playing hopscotch in the shadows of the church spires. The sound of church bells. The sweet rotting smell of forgotten bananas in the bottom of school bags. It was a five-minute walk from Tess’s mother’s home. The school was at the end of a tree-lined cul-de-sac and in summer the trees formed a canopy overhead like a cathedral. It was autumn now, still warm enough to swim in Sydney. The leaves of the liquidambars would be green and gold. Liam would walk through puddles of pale pink rose petals on uneven footpaths.
Some of Tess’s old teachers were still at St Angela’s. Kids who Tess and Felicity had been at school with had grown up and turned into mums and dads who sent their own children there. Tess’s mother mentioned their names sometimes, and Tess could never quite believe they still existed. Like the gorgeous Fitzpatrick boys. Six blond, square-jawed boys who were so similar they looked like they’d been purchased in bulk. They were so good-looking Tess used to blush whenever one of them walked by. One of the altar boys was always a Fitzpatrick. Each of them left St Angela’s in Year 4 and went off to that exclusive Catholic boys school on the harbour. They were wealthy as well as gorgeous. Apparently the eldest Fitzpatrick boy now had three daughters who were all at St Angela’s.
Could she really do it? Take Liam to Sydney and send him to her old primary school? It felt impossible; like she was trying to send him back through time to her childhood. For a moment she felt dizzy again. This wasn’t happening. Of course she couldn’t take Liam out of school. His sea-creature project was due on Friday. He had Little Athletics on Saturday. She had a load of washing ready to go on the line, and a potential new client to see first thing tomorrow morning.
But she saw that Will and Felicity were exchanging glances again, and her heart twisted. She looked at her watch. It was six-thirty pm. From upstairs she could hear the theme music for that unbearable show, The Biggest Loser. Liam must have switched off his DVD and changed it over to normal TV. In a minute he’d flick the channel looking for something with guns.
‘You get nothing for nothing!’ shouted someone from the television set.
Tess hated the empty motivational phrases they used on that show.
‘I’ll get us on a flight tonight,’ she said.
‘Tonight?’ said Will. ‘You can’t take Liam on a flight tonight.’
‘Yes I can. There’ll be a nine pm flight. We’ll make it easily.’
‘Tess,’ Felicity said. ‘This is over the top. You really don’t need to –’
‘We’ll get out of your way,’ said Tess. ‘So you and Will can sleep together. Finally. Take my bed! I changed the sheets this morning.’
Other things came into her head. Far worse things she could say.
To Felicity: ‘He likes you on top, so lucky you lost all that weight!’
To Will: ‘Don’t look too closely at all the stretch marks.’
But no, they were the ones who should be feeling as sordid as a roadside motel. She stood up and smoothed down the front of her skirt.
‘So that’s that. You’ll just have to deal with the agency without me. Tell the clients there’s been a family emergency.’
There certainly had been a family emergency.
She went to pick up the row of Felicity’s half-full coffee cups, linking her fingers through as many handles as she could. Then she changed her mind, put the cups back down, and while Will and Felicity watched, she carefully selected the two fullest cups, lifted them up in the palms of her hands and, with a netballer’s careful aim, threw cold coffee straight at their stupid, earnest, sorry faces.
chapter three
Rachel had thought they were going to tell her that they were having another baby. That’s what made it so much worse. As soon as they’d walked into the house she’d known there was big news. They’d had the self-conscious, smug expressions of people who know they are about to make you sit up and listen.
Rob had been talking more than usual. Lauren had been talking less than usual. Only Jacob had been his normal self, tearing through the house this way and that, flinging open the cupboards and drawers where he knew Rachel kept little treasure troves of toys and things she thought might interest him.
Of course, Rachel never asked Lauren or Rob if they had something they wanted to tell her. She wasn’t that sort of grandma, not her. She took meticulous care when Lauren visited to be the perfect mother-in-law: caring but not cloying, interested but not nosy. She never criticised or even made so much as a suggestion about Jacob, not even to Rob when he was on his own, because she knew how much worse it would be for Lauren to hear, ‘Mum says . . .’ This wasn’t easy. A steady stream of suggestions ran silently through her head like those snippets of news that run along the bottom of the TV on CNN.
For one thing, the child needed a haircut! Were the two of them blind that they hadn’t noticed the way Jacob kept blowing his hair out of his eyes? Also, the fabric of that dreadful Thomas the Tank shirt was much too scratchy on his skin. If he was wearing it on the day she had him, she always took it straight off and dressed him in a nice old soft T-shirt, and then madly re-dressed him when they were coming up the driveway.
But what good had it done her? All her careful mother-in-lawing? She may as well have been the mother-in-law from hell. Because they were leaving, and taking Jacob with them, as if they had every right, which they did, she guessed, technically.
There was no new baby. Lauren had been offered a job. A wonderful job in New York. It was a two-year contract. They told her at the dinner table when they were having dessert (Sara Lee apple custard turnover and ice cream). From their breathless elation you’d think Lauren had been offered a job in bloody paradise.
Jacob was sitting on Rachel’s lap when they told her, his solid, square little body melting against hers with the divine limpness of a tired toddler. Rachel was breathing in the scent of his hair, her lips against the little dip in the centre of his neck.
When she had first held Jacob in her arms and pressed her mouth to his tender, fragile scalp, it had felt as though she was being brought back to life, like a wilting plant being watered. His new baby scent had filled her lungs with oxygen. She’d actually felt her spine straighten, as if someone had finally released her from a heavy weight she’d been forced to carry for years. When she’d walked out into the hospital car park, she’d been able to see colour seeping back into the world.
‘We’re hoping you’ll come and visit us,’ said Lauren.
Lauren was a ‘career woman’. She worked for the Commonwealth Bank doing something very high up and stressful and important. She earned more than Rob. This wasn’t a secret. In fact, Rob seemed proud of it, mentioning it more than seemed necessary. If Ed had ever heard his son showing off about his wife’s pay packet he would have curled up and died, so it was lucky that he had . . . well, curled up and died.
Rachel had also worked for the Commonwealth Bank before she got married, although this coincidence had never come up in their conversations about Lauren’s work. Rachel didn’t know if her son had forgotten this fact about his mother’s life, or never knew it, or just didn’t find it that interesting. Of course, Rachel understood very well that her little bank job, the one she gave up as soon as she got married, bore no similarity to Lauren’s ‘career’. Rachel couldn’t conceive what Lauren actually did each day. All she knew was that it was something to do with ‘project management’.
You would think someone so good at project management could manage the project of packing a bag for Jacob when he came to stay the night, but apparently not. Lauren always seemed to forget something essential.
No more nights with Jacob. No more bath time. No more stories. No more dancing to the Wiggles in the living room. It felt like he was dying. She had to remind herself that he was still alive, sitting right here on her lap.
‘Yeah, you’ve got to come and see us in New York City, Mum!’ said Rob. He sounded like he already had an American accent. His teeth caught the light as he smiled at his mother. Those teeth had cost Ed and Rachel a small fortune. Rob’s strong straight piano-key teeth would be right at home in America.
‘Get yourself your first ever passport, Mum! You could even see a bit of America if you wanted. Go on one of those bus tours. Or, I know, do one of those Alaskan cruises!’
She wondered sometimes whether, if their lives hadn’t been divided so cleanly as if by a giant wall – before 6 April 1984, after 6 April 1984 – Rob would have grown up differently. Not quite so relentlessly upbeat, not quite so much like a real estate agent. Mind you, he was a real estate agent, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise when he behaved like one.
‘I want to do one of those Alaskan cruises,’ said Lauren. She put her hand over Rob’s. ‘I’ve always imagined us doing one when we’re old and grey.’
Then she coughed, probably because she remembered that Rachel was old and grey.
‘It certainly would be interesting.’ Rachel took a sip of her tea. ‘Maybe a little chilly.’
Were they mad? Rachel did not want to do an Alaskan cruise. She wanted to sit on the back step in the sunshine and blow bubbles for Jacob in the backyard and watch him laugh. She wanted to see him grow week by week.
And she wanted them to have another baby. Soon. Lauren was thirty-nine! Just last week Rachel had told Marla that there was plenty of time for Lauren to have another baby. They had them so late these days, she’d said. But that was when she’d secretly thought there was going to be an announcement any minute. In fact, she’d been planning for that second baby (just like an ordinary, interfering mother-in-law). She had decided that when the baby came, she’d retire. She loved her job at St Angela’s but in two years she’d be seventy (seventy!) and she was getting tired. Looking after two children two days a week would be enough for her. She’d assumed this was her future. She could almost feel the weight of the new baby in her arms.
Why didn’t the damned girl want another baby? Didn’t they want to give Jacob a little brother or sister? What was so special about New York, with all those beeping horns and steam billowing oddly from holes in the street? For Pete’s sake, the girl went back to work three months after Jacob was born. It wasn’t like having a baby would be that big an inconvenience for her.
If someone had asked Rachel that morning about her life, she would have said that it was full and satisfying. She looked after Jacob on Mondays and Fridays, and the rest of the time he was in day care while Lauren sat at her desk in the city, managing her projects. When Jacob was at day care Rachel worked at St Angela’s as the school secretary. She had her work, her gardening, her friend Marla, her stack of library books and two whole precious days a week with her grandson. Jacob often stayed overnight with her on the weekend too, so that Rob and Lauren could go out. They liked going out, those two, to their fancy restaurants, the theatre and the opera, do you mind. Ed would have guffawed over that.
If someone had asked, ‘Are you happy?’ she would have said, ‘I’m as happy as I can be.’
She had no idea that her life was so flimsily constructed, like a stack of cards, and that Rob and Lauren could march in here on a Monday night and cheerfully help themselves to the one card that mattered. Remove the Jacob card and her life collapsed, floated softly to the ground.
Rachel pressed her lips to Jacob’s head and tears filled her eyes.
Not fair. Not fair. Not fair.
‘Two years will go so quickly,’ said Lauren, her eyes on Rachel.
‘Like this!’ Rob clicked his fingers.
For you, thought Rachel.
‘Or we might not even stay the full two years,’ said Lauren.
‘Then again, you might end up staying for good!’ said Rachel, with a big bright smile, to show that she was a woman of the world and she knew how these things worked.
She thought of the Russell twins, Lucy and Mary, and how both their daughters had gone to live in Melbourne. ‘They’ll end up staying there,’ Lucy had said sadly to Rachel one Sunday after church. It was years and years ago, but it had stuck in Rachel’s head, because Lucy had been right. The last Rachel had heard, the cousins – Lucy’s shy little girl and Mary’s plump daughter with the beautiful eyes – were still in Melbourne and were there for good.
But Melbourne was a hop, skip and a jump away. You could fly to Melbourne for the day if you wanted. Lucy and Mary did it all the time. You couldn’t fly to New York for the day.
And then there were people like Virginia Fitzpatrick, who job-shared (in a manner of speaking) the school secretary’s position with Rachel. Virginia had six sons and fourteen grandchildren, and most of them lived within a twenty-minute radius on Sydney’s North Shore. If one of Virginia’s children decided to go to New York, she probably wouldn’t even notice, she had so many grandchildren to spare.
Rachel should have had more children. She should have been a good Catholic wife and mother and had at least six, but no, she hadn’t, because of her vanity, because she’d secretly thought she was special; different from all those other women. God knows exactly how she’d thought she was special. It wasn’t like she’d had any specific aspirations of career, or travel, or whatever; not like girls did these days.
‘When do you leave?’ Rachel said to Lauren and Rob as Jacob slid from her lap unexpectedly, and bolted into the living room on one of his urgent missions. A moment later she heard the sound of the television start up. The clever little thing had worked out how to use the remote control.
‘Not till August,’ said Lauren. ‘We’ve got lots to sort out. Visas and so on. We’ll have to find an apartment, a nanny for Jacob.’
A nanny for Jacob.
‘Job for me.’ Rob sounded a little nervous.
‘Oh, yes, darling,’ said Rachel. She did try to take her son seriously. She really did. ‘A job for you. In real estate, do you think?’
‘Not sure yet,’ said Rob. ‘We’ll have to see. I might end up being a house husband.’
‘So sorry I never taught him how to cook,’ said Rachel to Lauren, not especially sorry. Rachel had never been much interested in cooking or that good at it; it was just another chore that had to be done, like the laundry. The way people went on these days about cooking.
‘That’s okay,’ beamed Lauren. ‘We’ll probably eat out a lot in New York. The city that never sleeps, you know!’
‘Although, of course, Jacob will need to sleep,’ said Rachel. ‘Or will the nanny feed him while you’re out for dinner?’
Lauren’s smile wavered and she glanced at Rob, who was oblivious, of course.
The volume of the television suddenly increased, so the house boomed with cinematic sound. A male voice shouted, ‘You get nothing for nothing!’
Rachel recognised the voice. It was one of the trainers on The Biggest Loser. She liked that show. She found it soothing to get caught up in a brightly coloured, plastic world where all that mattered was how much you ate and exercised, where pain and anguish were suffered over no greater tragedy than push-ups, where people spoke intensely about calories and sobbed joyfully over lost kilos. And then they all lived happily, skinnily ever after.
‘You playing with the remote again, Jake?’ called out Rob over the noise of the TV. He left the table and went into the living room.
He was always the first to get up and go to Jacob. Never Lauren. Right from the beginning he’d changed nappies. Ed had never changed a nappy in his life. Of course all the daddies changed nappies these days. It probably didn’t hurt them. It just made Rachel feel awkward, almost embarrassed, as if they were doing something inappropriate, too feminine. How the girls of today would shriek if she was to ever admit to that!
‘Rachel,’ said Lauren.
Rachel saw that Lauren was looking at her nervously, as if she had a large favour to ask. Yes, Lauren, I’ll take care of Jacob while you and Rob live in New York. For two years? No problem. Off you go. Have a lovely time.
‘This Friday,’ said Lauren. ‘Good Friday. I know that it’s, ah, the anniversary –’
Rachel froze. ‘Yes,’ she said in her chilliest voice. ‘Yes it is.’ She had no desire to discuss this Friday with Lauren, of all people. Her body had known weeks ago that Friday was coming up. It happened every year in the last days of summer, when she felt that very first hint of crispness in the air. She’d feel a tension in her muscles, a prickling sense of horror, and then she’d remember: Of course. Here comes another autumn. A pity. She used to love autumn.
‘I understand that you go to the park,’ said Lauren, as if they were discussing the venue for an upcoming cocktail party. ‘It’s just that I wondered –’
Rachel couldn’t bear it.
‘Would you mind if we didn’t talk about it? Just not right now? Another time?’
‘Of course!’ Lauren flushed, and Rachel felt a pang of guilt. She rarely played that card. It made her feel cheap.
‘I’ll make us a cup of tea,’ she said, and began to stack the plates.
‘Let me help.’ Lauren half-stood.
‘Leave that,’ ordered Rachel.
‘If you’re sure.’ Lauren pushed a lock of strawberry-blonde hair behind her ear. She was a pretty girl. The first time Rob had brought her home to meet Rachel he’d barely been able to contain his pride. It had reminded her of his rosy plump face when he’d brought home a new painting from preschool.
What had happened to their family in 1984 should have made Rachel love her son even more, but it didn’t. It was like she’d lost her ability to love, until Jacob was born. By then, she and Rob had developed a relationship that was perfectly nice; but it was like that dreadful carob chocolate – as soon as you tasted it you knew it was just a wrong, sad imitation. So Rob had every right to take Jacob away from her. She deserved it for not loving him enough. This was her penance. Two hundred Hail Marys and your grandson goes to New York. There was always a price, and Rachel always had to pay it in full. No discounts. Just like she’d paid for her mistake in 1984.
Rob was making Jacob giggle now. Wrestling with him, probably, hanging him upside down by his ankles, the same way Ed used to wrestle with him.
‘Here comes the . . . TICKLE MONSTER!’ cried Rob.
Peal after peal of Jacob’s laughter floated into the room like streams of bubbles and Rachel and Lauren both laughed together. It was irresistible, like they were being tickled themselves. Their eyes met across the table, and at that instant Rachel’s laughter turned into a sob.
‘Oh, Rachel.’ Lauren half-rose from her seat and reached out a perfectly manicured hand (she had a manicure, a pedicure and a massage every third Saturday. She called it ‘Lauren time’. Rob brought Jacob over to Rachel’s place, whenever it was ‘Lauren time’, and they walked to the park on the corner and ate egg sandwiches). ‘I’m so sorry, I know how much you’ll miss Jacob, but –’
Rachel took a deep shaky breath and pulled herself together with all the strength that she had, as if she was heaving herself back up from a cliff edge.
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said so sharply that Lauren flinched and dropped back into her seat. ‘I’ll be fine. This is a wonderful opportunity for you all.’
She began stacking their dessert plates, roughly scraping leftover Sara Lee into a messy, unappealing pile of food.
‘By the way,’ she said, just before she left the room, ‘that child needs a haircut.’
chapter four
‘John-Paul? Are you there?’
Cecilia pressed the phone so hard to her ear that it hurt.
Finally he spoke. ‘Have you opened it?’ His voice was thin and reedy, like a querulous old man in a nursing home.
‘No,’ said Cecilia. ‘You’re not dead, so I thought I’d better not.’ She’d been trying for a flippant tone, but she sounded shrill, as if she was nagging him.
There was silence again. She heard someone with an American accent call out, ‘Sir! This way, sir!’
‘Hello?’ said Cecilia.
‘Could you please not open it? Would you mind? I wrote it a long time ago, when Isabel was a baby, I think. It’s sort of embarrassing. I thought I’d lost it actually. Where did you find it?’
He sounded self-conscious, as if he was talking to her in front of people he didn’t know that well.
‘Are you with someone?’ asked Cecilia.
‘No. I’m just having breakfast here in the hotel restaurant.’
‘I found it when I was in the attic, looking for my piece of the Berlin – anyway, I knocked over one of your shoeboxes and there it was.’
‘I must have been doing my taxes around the same time as I wrote it,’ said John-Paul. ‘What an idiot. I remember I looked and looked for it. I thought I was losing my mind. I couldn’t believe I would lose . . .’ His voice faded. ‘Well.’
He sounded so contrite, so full of what seemed like excessive remorse.
‘Well, that doesn’t matter.’ Now she sounded motherly, like she was talking to one of the girls. ‘But what made you write it in the first place?’
‘Just an impulse. I guess I was all emotional. Our first baby. It got me thinking about my dad and the things he didn’t get to say after he died. Things left unsaid. All the clichés. It just says sappy stuff, about how much I love you. Nothing earth-shattering. I can’t really remember to be honest.’
‘So why can’t I open it then?’ She put on a wheedling voice that slightly sickened her. ‘What’s the big deal?’
Silence again.
‘It’s not a big deal, but Cecilia, please, I’m asking you not to open it.’ He sounded quite desperate. For heaven’s sake! What a fuss. Men were so ridiculous about emotional stuff.
‘Fine. I won’t open it. Let’s hope I don’t get to read it for another fifty years.’
‘Unless I outlast you.’
‘No chance. You eat too much red meat. I bet you’re eating bacon right now.’
‘And I bet you fed those poor girls fish tonight, didn’t you?’ He was making a joke, but he still sounded tense.
‘Is that Daddy?’ Polly skidded into the room. ‘I need to talk to him urgently!’
‘Here’s Polly,’ said Cecilia, as Polly attempted to pull the phone from her grasp. ‘Polly, stop it. Just a moment. Talk to you tomorrow. Love you.’
‘Love you too,’ she heard him say as Polly grabbed the phone. She ran from the room with it pressed to her ear. ‘Daddy, listen, I need to tell you something, and it’s quite a big secret.’
Polly loved secrets. She hadn’t stopped talking about them, or sharing them, ever since she’d learned of their existence at the age of two.
‘Let your sisters talk to him too!’ called out Cecilia.
She picked up her cup of tea and placed the letter next to her, squaring it up with the edge of the table. So that was that. Nothing to worry about. She would file it away and forget about it.
He’d been embarrassed. That was all. It was sweet.
Of course, now she’d promised not to open it, she couldn’t. It would have been better not to have mentioned it. She’d finish her tea and make a start on that slice.
She pulled Esther’s book about the Berlin Wall over, flipped the pages and stopped at a photo of a young boy with an angelic, serious face that reminded her a little of John-Paul, the way he’d looked as a young man, when she’d first fallen in love with him. John-Paul had always taken great care with his hair, using a lot of gel to sculpt it into place, and he’d been quite adorably serious, even when he was drunk (they were often drunk in those early days). His gravity used to make Cecilia feel girly and giggly. They’d been together for ages before he’d revealed a lighter side.
The boy, she read, was Peter Fechter, an eighteen-year-old bricklayer who was one of the first people to die trying to escape the Berlin Wall. He was shot in the pelvis and fell back into the ‘death strip’ on the Eastern side, where he took an hour to bleed to death. Hundreds of witnesses on both sides watched, but nobody offered him medical assistance, although some people threw him bandages.
‘For heaven’s sake,’ said Cecilia crossly, and pushed the book away. What a thing for Esther to read, to know, that such things were possible.
Cecilia would have helped that boy. She would have marched straight out there. She would have called for an ambulance. She would have shouted, ‘What’s wrong with you people?’
Who knew what she would have done really? Probably nothing, if it meant the risk of being shot herself. She was a mother. She needed to be alive. Death strips were not part of her life. Nature strips. Shopping strips. She’d never been tested. She probably never would be tested.
‘Polly! You’ve been talking to him for hours! Dad is probably bored!’ yelled Isabel.
Why must they always be yelling? The girls missed their father desperately when he was away. He was more patient with them than Cecilia, and right from when they were little he’d always been prepared to be involved in their lives in ways Cecilia quite honestly couldn’t be bothered. He played endless tea parties with Polly, holding tiny teacups with his little finger held out. He listened thoughtfully to Isabel talk on and on about the latest drama with her friends. It was always a relief for them all when John-Paul came home. ‘Take the little darlings!’ Cecilia would cry, and he would, driving them off on some adventure, bringing them back hours later, sandy and sticky.
‘Daddy does not think I’m boring!’ screamed Polly.
‘Give the phone to your sister right now!’ yelled Cecilia.
There was a scuffle in the hallway and Polly reappeared in the kitchen. She came and sat down at the table with Cecilia and put her head in her hands.
Cecilia slid John-Paul’s letter in between the pages of Esther’s book and looked at her six-year-old daughter’s beautiful little heart-shaped face. Polly was a genetic anomaly. John-Paul was good-looking (a ‘spunk’ they used to call him) and Cecilia was attractive enough in low lighting, but somehow they’d managed to produce one daughter who was in a different league altogether. Polly looked just like Snow White: black hair, brilliant blue eyes and ruby lips: genuinely ruby lips; people thought she was wearing lipstick. Her two elder sisters with their ash-blonde hair and freckled noses were beautiful to their parents, but it was only Polly who consistently turned heads in shopping centres. ‘Far too pretty for her own good,’ Cecilia’s mother-in-law had observed the other day and Cecilia had been irritated but at the same time she’d understood. What did it do to your personality to have the one thing that every woman craved? Cecilia had noticed that beautiful woman held themselves differently; they swayed like palm trees in the breeze of all that attention. Cecilia wanted her daughters to run and stride and stomp. She didn’t want Polly to bloody sway.
‘Do you want to know the secret I told Daddy?’ Polly looked up at her through her eyelashes.
Polly would sway all right. Cecilia could see it already.
‘That’s okay,’ said Cecilia. ‘You don’t need to tell me.’
‘The secret is that I’ve decided to invite Mr Whitby to my pirate party,’ said Polly.
Polly’s seventh birthday was the week after Easter. Her pirate party had been a popular topic of conversation for the last month.
‘Polly,’ said Cecilia. ‘We’ve talked about this.’
Mr Whitby was the PE teacher at St Angela’s and Polly was in love with him. Cecilia didn’t know what it said about Polly’s future relationships that her first crush was a man who appeared to be about the same age as her father. She was meant to be in love with teenage popstars, not a middle-aged man with a shaved head. It was true that Mr Whitby had something. He was very broad chested and athletic looking and he rode a motorbike and listened with his eyes, but it was the school mums who were meant to feel his sex appeal (which they certainly did; Cecilia herself was not immune), not his six-year-old students.
‘We’re not asking Mr Whitby to your party,’ said Cecilia. ‘It wouldn’t be fair. Otherwise he’d feel like he had to come to everyone’s parties.’
‘He’d want to come to mine.’
‘No.’
‘We’ll talk about it another time,’ said Polly airily, pushing her chair back from the table.
‘We won’t!’ Cecilia called after her, but Polly had sauntered off.
Cecilia sighed. Well. Lots to do. She stood and pulled John-Paul’s letter from Esther’s book. First, she would file this damned thing.
He said he’d written it just after Isabel was born, and that he didn’t remember exactly what it said. That was understandable. Isabel was twelve, and John-Paul was often so vague. He was always relying on Cecilia to be his memory.
It was just that she was pretty sure he’d been lying.
chapter five
‘Maybe we should break in.’ Liam’s voice pierced the silent night air like the shriek of a whistle. ‘We could smash a window with a rock. Like, for example, that rock right there! See, Mum, look, see, see, can you see –’
‘Shhh,’ said Tess. ‘Keep your voice down!’ She banged the door knocker over and over.
Nothing.
It was eleven o’clock at night and she and Liam were standing at her mother’s front door. The house was completely dark, the blinds drawn. It looked deserted. In fact, the whole street seemed eerily silent. Was no one up watching the late news? The only light came from a streetlight on the corner. The sky was starless, moonless. The only sound was a single plaintive cicada, the last survivor of summer, and the soft sigh of far-off traffic. She could smell the sweet perfume of her mother’s gardenias. Tess’s mobile phone had run out of battery. She couldn’t call anyone, not even a taxi to take them to a hotel. Maybe they would have to break in, but Tess’s mother had become so security conscious over the last few years. Didn’t she have an alarm now? Tess imagined the sudden woop, woop of an alarm shattering the neighbourhood.
I can’t believe this is happening to me.
She hadn’t thought it through. She should have called to let her mother know that they were coming, but she’d been in such a state, booking the flight, packing, getting to the airport, finding the right gate, Liam trotting alongside her, talking the whole time. He was so excited, he wouldn’t shut up the whole flight, and now he was so exhausted he was virtually delirious.
He thought they were on a rescue mission to help Grandma.
‘Grandma has broken her ankle,’ Tess had told him. ‘So we’re going to stay and help her for a little while.’
‘What about school?’ he’d asked.
‘You can miss a few days of school,’ she’d told him, and his face had lit up like a Christmas tree. She hadn’t mentioned anything about attending a new school. Obviously.
Felicity had left, and while Tess and Liam packed, Will had slunk about the house, pale and sniffing.
When they were alone, and she was throwing clothes into a bag, he’d tried to talk to her, and she’d turned on him, like a cobra rising to strike, hissing through clenched, crazy teeth, ‘Leave me alone.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, taking a step backwards. ‘I’m so sorry.’
He and Felicity must have used the word ‘sorry’ about five hundred times by now.
‘I promise you,’ said Will, lowering his voice, presumably so Liam wouldn’t overhear, ‘if there’s any doubt in your mind, I want you to know that we never slept together.’
‘You keep saying that, Will,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why you think that makes it better. It makes it worse. It never occurred to me that you would sleep together! Like, thank you so much for your restraint. I mean, for God’s sake –’
Her voice trembled.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, and wiped the back of his hand across his nose.
Will had behaved perfectly normally in front of Liam. He’d helped him find his favourite baseball cap under his bed, and when the cab had arrived, he’d got down on his knees and half-cuddled, half-wrestled him in that rough, loving way of fathers with their sons. Tess had seen exactly how Will had managed to keep this thing with Felicity a secret for so long. Family life, even with just one little boy, had its own familiar rhythms and it was perfectly possible to keep right on dancing like you always had, even when your mind was somewhere else.
And now here she was, stranded in this sleepy little North Shore suburb of Sydney with a delirious six year old.
‘Well,’ she said carefully to Liam. ‘I guess we should –’
What? Wake up a neighbour? Risk the alarm?
‘Wait!’ said Liam. He put a finger to his lips; his big eyes were pools of shining blackness in the dark. ‘I think I hear something from inside.’
He pressed his ear to the front door. Tess did the same.
‘Hear it?’
She did hear something. A strange rhythmic thumping sound from overhead.
‘It must be Grandma’s crutches,’ said Tess.
Her poor mother. She’d probably been in bed. Her bedroom was right at the other end of the house. Bloody Will. Bloody Felicity. Dragging her poor crippled mum out of bed.
When exactly had this thing between Will and Felicity started? Was there an actual moment where something changed? How could she have missed it? She saw them together every single day of her life and she’d never noticed a thing. Felicity had stayed for dinner last Friday night. Maybe Will had been a little quieter than usual. Tess had thought it was because his back was playing up. He’d been tired. They’d all been working so hard. But Felicity had been in fine form. Luminous, even. Tess had caught herself staring a few times. Felicity’s beauty was still so new, and it made everything about her beautiful. Her laugh. Her voice.
Yet Tess hadn’t been wary. She’d been stupidly secure of Will’s love. Secure enough to wear her old jeans with the black T-shirt that Will said made her look like a bikie chick. Secure enough to tease him for his mild grumpiness. He’d whacked her bottom with the tea towel when they were cleaning up the kitchen afterwards.
They hadn’t seen Felicity on the weekend, which was unusual. She’d been busy, she said. It had been rainy and cold; Tess and Will and Liam had watched TV, played snap, made pancakes together. It had been a good weekend. Hadn’t it?
It occurred to her that Felicity was luminous on Friday night because she was in love.
The door swung open and light flooded the hallway. ‘What in the world?’ said Tess’s mother. She was wearing a blue quilted dressing-gown and leaning heavily on a pair of crutches, her eyes blinking myopically, her face dragged down with pain and effort.
Tess looked down at her mother’s white-bandaged ankle and imagined her waking up, hauling herself out of bed, hobbling around trying to find her dressing-gown and then the crutches.
‘Oh Mum,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Why are you sorry? What are you doing here?’
‘We’ve come –’ she began but her throat closed up.
‘To help you, Grandma!’ cried Liam. ‘Because of your ankle! We flew here in the dark!’
‘Well, that’s very lovely of you, my darling boy.’ Tess’s mother moved on her crutches to the side to let them in. ‘Come in, come in. Sorry I took so long coming to the door, I had no idea crutches were so damned tricky. I imagined myself swinging jauntily along, but they dig into your armpits like I don’t know what. Liam, go turn on the light in the kitchen and we’ll have some hot milk and cinnamon toast.’
‘Cool!’ Liam headed towards the kitchen and, for some inexplicable six-year-old-boy reason, began moving his arms and legs jerkily like a robot. ‘I compute! I compute! Affirmative – to – cinnamon toast!’
Tess carried their bags inside.
‘Sorry,’ she said, again, as she put them down in the hallway and looked up at her mother. ‘I should have called. Is your ankle very painful?’
‘What happened?’ said her mother.
‘Nothing.’
‘Rubbish.’
‘Will,’ she began, and stopped.
‘My darling girl.’ Her mother lurched about alarmingly as she tried to reach for her without losing hold of the crutches.
‘Don’t break another bone,’ Tess steadied her. She could smell her mother’s toothpaste, her face cream and soap, and beneath it all that familiar musky, musty Mum smell. On the hallway wall behind her mother’s head was a framed photo of herself and Felicity at seven years old, in their white lacy communion dresses and veils, their palms piously pressed together at the centre of their chests in the traditional first communion pose. Auntie Mary had an identical photo in the same spot in her hallway. Now Felicity was an atheist, and Tess described herself as ‘lapsed’.
‘Hurry up and tell me,’ said Lucy.
‘Will,’ Tess tried again. ‘And, and . . .’ She couldn’t finish.
‘Felicity,’ supplied her mother. ‘Am I right? Yes.’ She lifted one elbow and thumped a crutch hard against the floor so that the first communion photo rattled. ‘The little bitch.’
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